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Male astronauts lose vision in long term space travel, but not women........interesting...........

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About half of the astronauts aboard the international space station have developed an increasing pressure inside their heads, an intracranial pressure, leading to a condition called papilledema.

Astronaut Mike Barratt, for example, used to be nearsighted. But now, the space veteran says he's eagle-eyed at long distance but needs glasses for reading. There is no treatment and no answers as to why female space flyers are not affected.

Doctors have found that Barratt's retinas have microscopic folds or wrinkles on them, and the back of his eye, the optic nerve, is no longer round but has flattened.

"I think this is showing that there are physiologic aspects of adaptation to spaceflight we weren't seeing before," said Barratt.

This raises a red flag for all of NASA's plans for long-duration human space flight. The space station is supposed to be the test bed for how humans would learn to live in space, but it opens profound questions on whether humans will ever venture to Mars or to an asteroid if they are unable to figure out how the outer-space environment is affecting the eyes.

"This has all of our attention," said Terry Taddeo, the acting chief of space medicine at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

"It is a serious problem and one we are going to have to understand more about before we would be able to send somebody into a long-duration mission away from Earth, where they would be away for years," he said.

A clip from the documentary Chasing Ice. It's about some guy who set up time lapse cameras on glaciers that recorded for years, really interesting. This clip shows the largest calving event ever caught on film.